Peopled by inhabitants given over to introspection, and as fond of theology as the Scotch, the early New England communities were intensely religious and sectarian. God to them was a Personal Sovereign, intimately concerned with their daily life. They were His chosen people, and, as such, pledged to obedience to His service. The Church was His Bride; the clergyman was His spokesman, and received the deference—social as well as official—which was due to one so augustly commissioned. The social as well as the intellectual life of the community centred almost exclusively in the life of the church and the sermons of its clergy. Sectarian animosities were the inevitable product of a mistaken emphasis put upon the form or utterance of truth, rather than upon truth itself; or, to put it differently, of a provincialism and narrowness of vision that made it impossible for the many to understand that truth is many-sided, that men are different temperamentally, that revelation is continuous and progressive, and that religion is not theology. Communities exist in New England where the old view still obtains, where sectarianism is as rampant as ever, where the clergyman is the social autocrat as well as the shepherd of souls. But such towns are becoming fewer and fewer as the years go by, and of towns of the newer type, where the church is recognized as only one of the many agents which God has for ushering in His Kingdom on earth, New England now has quite as many, probably, as are to be found elsewhere.
To those interested in the theological and religious history of English-speaking peoples, certain New England towns have a peculiar fascination and value as environments which have affected character. Northampton, Massachusetts, will ever be a Mecca because of the identification of Jonathan Edwards with the town. Concord, in the same commonwealth, has not only the unique glory that belongs to a town where national history has been made and the best American literature of its class written by Hawthorne and Thoreau, but also it is the town where Emerson’s ministerial ancestors lived, where he flowered out and became
that grey-eyed seer
Who in pastoral Concord ways
With Plato and Hafiz walked.
Newport, Rhode Island, with all its present pre-eminence as a place where “Fashion is a potency ... making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting,” will ever remain most worthy of resort because it was the birthplace of William Ellery Channing, and, for thirty years, was the home of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, both eminent as theologians and as brave pioneer antagonists of human slavery. Dr. Hopkins was the model for the New England pastor described by Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Minister’s Wooing. Northfield, Massachusetts, is known to thousands of Christians the world over, who have never seen its rare beauty of river and landscape, because a boy, one Dwight L. Moody, was born and bred there, and has become the greatest evangelist of modern times. Litchfield, Connecticut, is famous as the birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher, and if one wishes flash-light pictures of New England ecclesiastical and social life at the beginning of this century, let one read the autobiographic records of Lyman, Henry Ward, Harriet, and Catherine E. Beecher.
Portland, Maine, is known to thousands throughout the English-speaking world, who are ignorant of every other fact in its long and honorable history, because Francis E. Clark there conceived and began that movement to enlist young people in active Christian service, which is now known as the International Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, with 54,191 local societies, and more than three and one quarter million adherents enrolled, Russia alone, of the nations of the earth, being without a society now. Hartford, Connecticut, with a discernment and gratitude not always displayed by municipalities, has named its beautiful municipal park after Horace Bushnell, for many years its most eminent divine and “first citizen.”
Salem, fascinating as it is because of its connection with the witchcraft delusion and the early Puritan theocracy; because of its being for a time the home of Hawthorne, who has preserved its ancient local color and atmosphere in his fiction; and because of its ancient glory as a seaport town, whence departed a fleet of sailing craft that made Salem known throughout the world, in places where Boston and New York were then unknown, nevertheless derives its chief glory from the fact that it was the town where Roger Williams, the Welsh statesman and prophet, found a church willing to sit at his feet. The church’s loyalty, however, gave way at last to the resistless pressure of the civil authorities and the zealous ecclesiastical tyrants of the Puritan commonwealth, and it permitted him to depart, to establish in Rhode Island a community based upon the principle of entire liberty of conscience, and majority rule in secular affairs. Massachusetts’ loss and the world’s gain are thus summed up by Gervinus the German historian:
“The theories of freedom in Church and State, taught in the schools of philosophy in Europe, were here [Rhode Island] brought into practice in the government of a small community. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain universal suffrage, a general elective franchise, annual parliaments, entire religious freedom, and the Miltonian right of schism would be of short duration. But these institutions have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New York, the High-Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe.”
Boston, with all her glories, has none of which she is more proud, than the fact that within her borders Phillips Brooks was born and labored most of his life. Those who came within his range of influence said of him, as Father Taylor said of Emerson, “He might think this or that, but he was more like Jesus Christ than any one he had ever known.”
To mention Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Francis E. Clark, and Dwight L. Moody, is to name the greatest spiritual forces which New England has known, and towns fed with manna by such prophets have not failed to indicate the influence of personality in transforming environment.
The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. Education, wealth, moral worth, shrewd native sense, oratory, gifts of persuasion, the stirrings of ambition, civic pride, thrift, foresight, all have their due weight in this forum, this “school as well as source of democracy”—as Mr. Bryce aptly phrases it. But when the vote is taken, the blacksmith and the bank president, the master and the servant, the principal of the high school and the loafer around the village bar stand on precisely the same footing. The vote of one is as decisive as that of the other,—no less, no more.